I_smell

The pre-rendered trailers for Bioshock 1 and 2 were fucking outstanding, I can't wait for whatever this TV ad is. SPEAK OF THE FUCKING DEVIL AND HE WILL APPEAR!!!!!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVKAsYn9J6s That seems chopped up and edited down. Maybe there's a more coherent one about to hit at some kind of super bowl or something. EDIT- Oh yeah I forgot to mention you guys' favourite website has SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT THIS GAME!

Yeah I thought the role of power fantasies in games was something I was gonna start talking about, but now that was 5 posts ago. Now we're talking about sexist jokes or something? The thread's too broad to be an actual conversation.

Oh god this thread is big! I watched this video a couple days ago. If she wanted to just describe what some classic woman tropes are, then OK, ya done that... wasn't very thought-provoking or insightful though, it's kind of just like reading a wikipedia page out loud. I mean none of it was anything to do with Video games really, except for some examples, but you could make the same video about books or movies without changing much. MAYBE that's just cos it's episode 1, but she didn't mention much about game design for the next two episodes. If you would've talked about beating characters up and dying a hundred times, and more of the things the game's demanding of you as a player, then made that about gender roles: maybe that'd be more interesting.

"Guardian of the game" is a way more badass name than "Boss", and is also probably the name of a good 80's sci-fi thriller. I would want the giant three-headed hydra from God of War because I dunno guys, I'm jes screwin around! Can you imagine it, hohoho! Mewtwo would hate jeans Friday.

Oh on the topic of this Xbox sale-- I know people say this every day, but the Xbox dashboard is rubbish. They've had this sale on all week with daily deals. I know this because a couple days ago, I went on my usual spree of downloading random demos, and decided to click around. Today they seem to have a fighting-game theme going on where Super Street Fighter 4, Mortal Kombat vs DC, Tekken 6 and King of Fighters 13 are £4.50 each. Max Payne 3 is FOUR POUND! Metal Gear HD Collection has been MADE AVAILABLE DIGITALLY- it was only retail before, believe it or not. That is great. I'm downloading at least 2 of those. Even after checking out this sale every day, it just took me about 10 minutes to find. I stumbled over the Gears of War 3 Season Pass, which is on sale for god-knows-why, and at some point I clicked what I thought would open up the sale, but loaded the Internet Explorer app and played an ad. I WILL MAKE YOU THE GRAPHIC THAT SAYS "FIGHTING GAME SALE, ALL UNDER £4.99". TRAILERS FOR KINECT GAMES GETS MORE OF A THUMBNAIL THAN THIS? SHOOT YOUR OWN TEETH OUT WITH A GUN! Calming down, I understand these things fall apart because it's a beaurocracy of a dozen people who each have to tick a hundred boxes before they can do anything- I get what the problem is. Also this MGS 3 HD has the nightmare scene taken out.

God dammit I saw that Kanye and Lynch game on sale twice and scrolled over it. If someone woulda told me sooner! Maybe I'll buy it full price. I guess this is how sales work. "Kanye and Lynch" was deliberate. Dark Mist seems really good, I'd buy that if I had a playstation.

It would've been perfect if when they said "you're here to steal new memes, such as fuck Brad Shoemaker" at the start, Brad would've said "actually it's Fuck Ryan Davis".

Wow I had no idea that the design director at Zynga came from designing Civilization games at Firaxis.

I think you mean the Cerny PlerStertion.

I think tiple-A used to mean a publisher's priority game for that quarter. To identify the game that they'd be betting most of their resources on, used by either people within the company, or by analysts. I heard that a million years ago, so I can't remember. Around the time the latest Devil May Cry came out, I decided to buy Bayonetta. I heard it was the evolution of those games I liked so much, and playing it I CAN SEE WHY people would say that. I thought the combat was enjoyable and pretty good, pretty difficult. It didn't quite grab me the same way DMC 4 did. I got up to the last mission but stopped playing, cos they were recycling boss encounters so much, and all the cutscenes and dialogue is 100% pure flaming garbage- I'd rather play some kind of survival mode or challenge mode than play whatever the final boss is, but it seems like there isn't one. There's some cool design ideas in how the fighting works, in the middle of a katamari ball of just random, unrelated nonsense. Also- I've never played Devil May Cry 1, and watching GiantBomb's playthrough of it: WOW. All those concepts I like so much in DMC4? Turns out they were in the first game. A lot of the stuff I thought Bayonetta added? In Devil May Cry 1. That depressed me a lil bit

I know this is the point of this whole thread, but that is some future fucking sci-fi fucking shit!!!!!!!!!

Yeah you're right, but I still feel like this might be the last console we'll see from one of these companies, and nothing so far looks like it could be the next PS2 or Wii.

Y'know I just added up that the Wii U's made a tenth the splash of the Wii, the PS4 is a lot like a PS3 with More Graphics Technical, Zynga's dropping out of social to work on fucking casinos, and Unreal's publicly asking people to double their budgets and team sizes... The next few years of video games is starting to look fucking NOT GOOD.

I'll update you guys when it's ready for a beta. I'm up in the air waiting on a couple things til then. I mean really it's that I've never done this kind of multiplayer code before, and I need someone who's good at it.

Oh I didn't plan that, I just drew the first 4 planes I thought of. I'm actually changing Bison's plane to more of a jet, I don't want old bi-planes in there. I remember thinking it's funny that these guys are having a pie-fight with multi-million-dollar engineering masterpieces, and I wanna hold onto that. Wolf's is a one-man glider plane just because it has no health and is prone to breaking apart. I'm writing a bunch of design doc stuff down right now and I wanna just post it on the internet, cos I've never designed a multiplayer game before but I THINK I'm doing it right? I think?

Yeah, fighting your way into the jet is something I'll figure out down the line. TF2 has loads of backstory and side-story stuff but it's all outside of the game. It's stuff that hardcore fans CAN seek out if they want. The art direction in TF2 is all this old vintage-ass look. People don't dress like the Scout any more, and spies don't look like the Spy nowadays- and the music is this .The style is a solid one in TF2, but if you don't like that stuff you wouldn't even notice it was there because they've got such a light touch with it. I bet plenty of people never even thought about what decade this was set in. You don't have to like the 30's to like TF2, but with a game that's more overbaring with it's aesthetic: you kind of DO have to like anime to like Asura's Wrath. It turns out hooking someone into a single-player game is totally different than bringing groups of people into a multiplayer. I wanna make a game that's an easy sell- not FROM ME, but from a player who wants to get his friends to join. TF2 is the perfect example of what I'm talking about, and how to do it successfully. Like anything else though, it's not a hard n fast rule: Warcraft is completely reliant on orcs and elves and that has a billion players. There's a great GDC talk about how they sacrificed cool, badass art for the function of it being a good spectator game. I want my game to be a good lobby to goof around with your friends in, and I think this is a step along the way to making that a priority.

I'm doing a lot of art concepts now and it's weirdly hard. I've kind of come to the conclusion that multiplayer games are halfway just a lobby for people to goof around with their friends, so trying to shout over people with a loud, unique aesthetic isn't gonna help with that. The game is other people, and if the other people are bizarre anime pirate-girl monsters then you're not gonna be fast friends as easily as if they were just dudes. So usually with art stuff I've bin learning to go super dense and trying to always add more layers- but with this I have to be as blank as possible so that a guy who doesn't like wizards, and doesn't like astronauts, and doesn't like ostentatious armour-lords can all jump in and LIKE each other and be friends. So I'm filing down these huge jackets and scarves and hats, still hoping that what I come out with isn't boring. Oh and the main glitch right now is that sometimes when you steal a jet, it ejects wrong and ends up with 2 pilots in the same jet, which leads to a downward spiral of breaking.

Alright guys here's an update on this jet-stealing game. PROTOTYPE! (note every time I show this to people it decides to break and glitch apart, so expect broken-ness) Left-click to shoot, right-click to eject. You can steal other jets by aiming at them and right-clicking. BISON has a rocket on Space-bar. After shooting the rocket, you can pop out and hijack it same as other jets. SNAKE drops mines on Space-bar that you can also hijack. WOLF has a jetpack, and the other guy doesn't really have anything. LOADS of ideas in mind for stuff like piggybacking on team-mates, pushing mines around, a level with a roof, etc. My network code is a bit crap because I've never done this before, and also I don't have an office full of people to test a multiplayer game with YET!!!!!! What do you guys think of these potential game modes? HEIST HUNT RATIONS DEATHMATCH I have a billion things to say about this stuff, but y'know, long post, I'll cut it off here. EXCITING! EDIT-- I put piggybacking in. I didn't expect the feeling of "HOP ON MY BACK! wweeeeeeee!" to be as fun as it is.

Ah crap I thought this came out the end of february, just looked up and remembered it comes out in March >:I

The fact that the DRIVECLUB guy rides a bicycle to work is fantastic.

In all seriousness guys, Jake is at least better looking than David Cage. Give the guy a break!

No it's Dishonoured mask guy. Yeah the main thing I took away was that I'm throwing in the towel on stuff like Killzone 4 and InFamous 3. Maybe I'd like WatchDogs, but hey I never bought Assasin's Creed 3 and I never got around to buying Far Cry 3, so I guess I'm just not interested in this stuff any more. I was watching the Quick Look for Crysis 3 on GiantBomb that morning, and was kind of laughing at how much exposition and character dialogue and tutorials and flashy showboating there was. I was thinking "is anyone following the story of PSYCHO, PROPHET and NOMAD? who gives a shit about this stuff! At the end of the day there's a crossbow with lightning arrows and we've all used those in other games; Rage had those. I found it genuinely silly how many millions of dollars were blasting out of the screen while it had such dumb, forgettable characters and such well-covered game mechanics. Then the whole PlayStation thing was just 2 hours of "Get used to it". So for me it's gonna be Steam, independant games, and continuing to pick up stuff I've not played before. And I know that's hardly a surprise, I'm here on the Idle Thumbs forums, so duh.

I came out of this stream wondering whether or not I'm just growing out of video games.

There's a Dishonoured Australia Day referrence in there (January 27th).